Discovering Myself in 'The Undiscovered Country'

As a kid, I loved "Star Trek VI" for the murder mystery. As an adult, I love it for helping me understand where I came from.

By
Anne T. Donahue

Jan 29, 2018

Paramount Pictures

"In space, all warriors are cold warriors."

When actor Leonard Nimoy approached director Nicholas Meyer with the question, "What if the Wall came down in space?," it was timely. Two years before the release of "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," the Berlin Wall fell down, marking the end of the USSR and the beginning of liberation for the countries oppressed by it.

In 1989, I was four. I didn’t understand what independence meant for Lithuania, or for the relatives I barely knew who lived there. But my mom, the daughter of Lithuanian refugees, paid close attention to the news, and I remember walking in on animated conversations between my grandpa and his Lithuanian friends, who always seemed to be "talking politics."

What if the Wall came down in space?

As a kid whose primary concern was whether I was having ice cream for dessert, I didn’t much care about the Wall or the USSR or Lithuania's newfound independence. I was born privileged. Unlike my grandparents and their family and friends, I’ve never had to ration my food or live in fear of expressing my opinions, lest they be considered dangerous. Unlike my grandparents, I hadn’t walked by foot from Lithuania to Germany during bombings to spend five years in DP camps before arriving in Canada and the United States, hoping to carve out a new life. I was spoiled. By seven, I got to rent "Star Trek VI" once a week, and if I was lucky, I got popcorn, too.

To me, this was a dream — because I loved everything about "Star Trek VI." I loved Christopher Plummer as General Chang, a Shakespeare-quoting Klingon. I loved Cliff Eidelman’s melodramatic score that made every scene so tense and exciting. I loved Iman’s guest role and Kim Cattrall’s bangs. (And I still do — let me have this.) But I especially loved the murder mystery, and all the action that surrounded it.

It’s interesting to look back on something you loved while young and to realize you’d been affected by something you hadn’t really clued into yet.

And the film is full of action: Minutes into "Star Trek VI," a Klingon moon explodes. Sulu’s ship is hit with the shockwaves, a distress signal is sent, and from there, we learn that as a result of the disaster, the Klingons will die off in about 50 Earth years.

Spock (played by Nimoy, who penned an early version of the story) parlays the tragedy into a chance for interstellar peace. He volunteers Kirk and the Enterprise crew to escort Klingon High Chancellor Gorkon to talks that could potentially end years of animosity between both sides. But Gorkon is assassinated shortly after, and as we begin piecing together who did it, we come face to face with themes of prejudice, racism, and, above all, fear.

It was a lot for my 7-year-old self to wrap her head around. And likely explains why I zeroed in on the murder mystery instead.

But while "The Undiscovered Country" gets credit for instilling my love of true crime (an essay unto itself), it took years for me to recognize its parallels to the Cold War and the political climate that affected my family.

Most works are fiction are rooted in what’s happened before.

It’s interesting to look back on something you loved while young and to realize you’d been affected by something you hadn’t really clued into yet. I was in elementary school when I recognized a Klingon’s English-speaking accent as being similar to my grandfather’s, but I was a teenager before realizing the asteroid colony where Kirk and Dr. McKoy end up is meant to reflect the realities of a Siberian gulag. During WWII, two of my great-uncles served as Lithuanian freedom fighters when they were captured by the Russian army and sent to Siberia for 20 years. And while another managed to get away, he couldn’t return to Lithuania again under the threat of being "disappeared."

The older I got, the more I began to find out about my mom’s family, and the more that I began to see the parallels. When my grandpa decided to share (which was rare), I learned about his trip back to Lithuania before the dissolution of the USSR, and how at one point, the KGB boarded his train and began searching and dumping passengers’ bags. I learned how he and his brothers were trailed at hotel bars, and how he friendlily confronted a KGB officer who was posing as a server and invited him to join he and his brothers at dinner (subsequently making him very nervous). He told me about how the hotel tried to take his passport, and how after arriving in Moscow, his means of transportation was nearly changed by officers who wanted to see what he was up to. And when I expressed shock or asked if he was scared, he merely shrugged: "It’s just how it was," was his matter-of-fact answer.

The movies that end up meaning the most offer a gateway to the parts of yourself you hadn’t really connected with before.

None of this was on my radar when I was obsessing over Christopher Plummer’s eyepatch as a second grader, or when I was shouting dialogue to my classmates during snowball fights. To me, in my comfortable, uncensored childhood, a work camp on an asteroid seemed too terrifying to be real, the differences between the Klingons and the Federation too vast to be inspired by life, and the prejudices around both merely part of a story. Until I started growing up enough to understand that most works are fiction are rooted in what’s happened before.

Of course, no one in my family was framed for trying to assassinate a chancellor, nor was I raised to believe peace with the USSR (and eventually Russia) was impossible, the way Kirk harbored his own personal animosity against the Klingons. The concrete similarities between "Star Trek VI" and my family’s history are limited (especially since one is set entirely in space), but that’s also a testament to the power of a good movie: while your own story may be the furthest thing from it, the movies that end up meaning the most offer a gateway to the parts of yourself you hadn’t really connected with before. Or, in my case, a means of better understanding where and who I’ve come from.

Anne T. Donahue is a writer and person from Cambridge, Ontario. Her first book, "Nobody Cares," will be out in September 2018.

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